Where is the Real Amway?
Posted June 21, 2005 | 1 comment
A question often asked is - when is the ODP more relevant than a search engine?
A reasonable question - considering that ODP claims to have less than five million sites listed, whereas Google has many times more than that number. However, in many cases, the results returned from ODP are biased, and those sites that should appear at the top for a search result end up getting pushed out by succesfull SEO work. Now when that SEO work turns black hat, then it can actually twist the results to be very incorrect and that’s not nice.
In a recent posting in an SEO forum, where the ongoing question of the relevancy of ODP was being discussed, another thread caught my eye.
Companies subvert search results to squelch criticism
This page alleges, that by massive use of weblogs, a company was able to influence the search results. It’s in cases like this that ODP shines. Maybe not all relevant sites are listed, but the validity of the listed sites is much higher than typical search results.
A search on ODP for Quixtar finds the following categories
Business: Opportunities: Opposing Views: Amway and Quixtar
Business: Opportunities: Networking-MLM: Amway and Quixtar
and one of the sites mentioned in the article AmQuix.info is right there to be seen. Now that is nice.
Comments
Anonymous coward said:
But what about those sites which should be included in the results because their content and design merit it, but aren’t because an ODP editor was slacking or simply don’t add sites because it may tip the SEO scales in their favor.
Not calling you a bad editor or anything of that nature, but the ODP isn’t as glorified as you’d like us to believe and neither should your results be featured at the very top of the search engines either.
July 6, 2005 | Permalink | Reply